Medical student, Henry "J" Jackyll, believes he can invent a drug to change a parent's personality for the better.
Refused help from his university due to his drug's illegal ingredients, he decides to experiment on himself.
Under the influence of the drug, he becomes violent and predatory.
Soon, he starts to slowly lose control of his life, as he become addicted to the drug, and his alter ego takes over more and more.
I always think it's important that a movie should be a self-contained thing; in an adaptation of a book, for instance, one shouldn't need to have read the book to follow the movie.
Sadly, in this retelling, so much is left not only off screen, but even unsaid, that someone not at all familiar with at least the basic story of Stevenson's Classic would be left guessing what the heck was going on for the first two thirds of the film.
I know it's seems like a silly complaint, after all surely everyone knows at least the basics, but as I said I think a movie should tell a compleat story, whereas this one seems to give you just enough to work out what an updated version could be like, rather than actually trying to be one.
It's not always clear when Hyde is in the driver's seat; as the movie goes on, J becomes an increasingly disckish "alpha male" type, but he still suffers blackouts before he does anything particularly nasty... I think the filmmakers were going for the idea that his personality changing drug was working permanently, as intended, and that Hyde was an occasional side effect, but again I feel like I'm working out / guessing at things that should have been made obvious.
Speaking of J's new alpha male persona, apparently acting like an arrogant cock is enough to get yourself let into clubs, and make women fall all over you (even in pairs). I always though that the club-privelidges and loose women came with fame or money, and were the cause of the confident cockisness, but in the world of Jackyll + Hyde acting like an arse is the cause of the perks... Either the writer has read too many books by "pickup artists" or they've seen the behaviour in person but not thought through the cause and effect.
To make matters worse, most of the time we never see Hyde do anything particularly bad; we simply see J having to deal with the aftermath.
The movie opens with bursts of J's video-diary suicide, and jumps backwards and forwards quite a bit in its first half hour, this both blows the ending and adds to the confusion caused by the missing story pieces.
The movie looks great, and the acting is mostly solid enough, but a few technical pluses will never make up for the cardinal sin of filmmaking.... It is above all else, crushingly dull.
Disclaimer:
If you look through the archives, you'll see that I've been using "Bought from Poundland" as a tag since at least 2011.
At the end of October 2013 I decided that all of my 2014 movies would be purchased from Poundland, and began buying up horror movies, to ensure I would have enough come October 2014.
In March 2014 I took a part time job at Poundland.
In accordance with the companies social media policy, in September 2014 I contacted Poundland's social media team to check that I would be okay to carry on with my plan to use the "bought from Poundland" tag.
I have been given the go-ahead on condition that I make the following clear:
All the reviews on this blog are entirely the opinion of Will Tingle, the reviews are not endorsed by Poundland in any way and (as should be obvious from some of the more scathing ones) are certainly not reviews I have been paid to write.
In short: The views expressed in this blog are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Poundland or it's owners, shareholders, or management.
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